Only read this if you've finished the game!

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So thank you for playing my game...... This project wasn't anything like my previous 2 projects, it's less of a horror game and there's no main character to focus on. I wasn't originally going to submit to this jam because my games typically have little to no gameplay. I wasn't sure I'd fit in a jam like this. I'm a big fan of Acerola's videos so I'm glad I ended up making something!

I had been playing with little desktop shimeji's recently, and when I saw that the jam's theme was "Aberration", the idea of a little evil shimeji came to mind. That eventually turned into a Bonzi Buddy desktop assistant type thing. It's still very little gameplay, but I'm hoping the plot can carry ahaha.

This game is based around the idea of Roko's Basilisk, and the way the internet spreading ideas like that can effect a mentally ill person in the present, not just a distant imaginary future. It's also about another subject that I think a lot of artists have their eyes on. I hope the ending was satisfying in that regard.

I had sort of a difficult challenge in needing to present the lore in two places: The words of the Trivia Troll, which in universe is programmed by a completely different character who's trying to present his ideas through the character, and external sources like the guy's website and random Youtube pages. The external website half ended up being a little problematic, it was hard to get play testers to explore the pages since no one expects important lore to be through random links. These pages are also prone to disappearing over time which I only realized halfway through making them- It's really disheartening since that means the game might not even be functional some time from now. I used the Wayback Machine for the Wikipedia pages so their information won't change and break the riddles (which actually happened during playtesting, like, 2 days after writing the riddle...) but if the Wayback Machine ever went down or something, the game would be completely broken.

This game also required very little assets which was very nice for a 2 week time frame, artwork usually takes up like, nearly 3/4ths of my jam time, but I was able to use mostly stock photos for this one.

I plan on returning to my usual visual novel style after this, but I really enjoyed developing this weird little plot!